Nauruan
Language · official in 1 country
Dorerin Naoero had no written form until German missionaries brought one in the 19th century, and Philip Delaporte began to alphabetise it in 1899. It is the Austronesian language spoken natively on Nauru, the Republic of Naoero. Its dialects, once so far apart that districts struggled to understand each other, merged into a standard as printed texts spread.
The language on record
- Own name
- Dorerin Naoero
- ISO 639-1
- NA
- ISO 639-3
- NAU
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- Austronesian
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Nauruan is official
Nauru, the island republic whose people speak it natively, is the only record listing Nauruan as official.
Official beside Nauruan
About Nauruan
How missionaries set Nauruan in print
Writing reached Nauru later than other islands in the region. The Protestant Mission at Orro under Philip Delaporte put out mimeographed primers from 1900, starting with Buch en lesen n kakairun, and filled gaps in the vocabulary with German, which was taught alongside Nauruan. In 1906 the mission bought a printing press in Sydney and trained Nauruan converts, among them Timothy Detudamo and Jacob Aroi, to run it. Its first printed book, Toranab in Bibel, ran to 400 copies.
The New Testament followed in 1907, and the full Bible in 1918, after Nauruans raised $500 to send Detudamo to the United States to finish the work with Delaporte. Delaporte's German and Nauruan pocket dictionary of 1907 glosses about 1,650 German words. The Catholic missionary Alois Kayser distrusted it and wrote a new grammar, completed in 1936. The German loans still show in the Bible text, where God is Gott.
What the Australian spelling reform changed
In 1936 the Australian administration set up a Language Committee, and its recommendations were gazetted on 5 November 1938. They replaced the tilde with a circumflex, wrote ng for ñ, bw and kw for bu and qu, and j for ts, and brought in English names for the days and months in place of German ones. The committee stayed on as a de facto language academy.
The reform only partly took hold. Õ and ũ are still written with tildes, while ng, bw and kw did take over, and district names such as Baiti and Ijuw keep the old spelling. The alphabet in use today has 30 Latin letters.
Common questions
Questions about Nauruan
What do Nauruans call their language?
Dorerin Naoero. Naoero is also the country's own name, as in the Republic of Naoero.
Why does Nauruan still use tildes?
The 1938 reform swapped the tilde for a circumflex, so õ and ũ were to become ô and û. That change never caught on, and the tilde letters are still written today, even though other parts of the reform, such as ng for ñ, did take hold.